Consulting Research Computer Scientist

Mining and automating adding buddies in Google Talk

Did you know that anyone with a gmail address by default has a Google Talk ID? Just for fun, I did a grep though all my email files for addresses that match the pattern “@gmail.com” and did a quick regex insert for some of them to the blist.xml file that GAIM and Adium use to keep your buddy lists. This was an easy way (well for me at least) to add a group of people to my buddy list. Next time one of your new invites logs on, they get an invitation from you to be added to their Google Talk buddy list.

So if you get an invite from me, now you know why… Well maybe not actually why, but at least you know how.

If I didn’t send you an invite, try me. I’ll give you just one guess at my Google Talk ID.